Bitcoin is “Reverse-Money”, which makes it a Scam

You don’t buy Bitcoin by your money. Somebody else buys your money by Bitcoin.

There are thousands of websites, videos, blogs, etc. that explain what Bitcoin is and how its underlying technology—the blockchain—works. Here I want to use an analogy to explain what I think Bitcoin really is. This is done in two parts: (1) The intuition behind Bitcoin, (2) Why Bitcoin (and any cryptocurrency) is a scam.

1. The Intuition Behind Bitcoin

At its core, a Bitcoin can be thought of as a string (sequence) of zeros and ones like this:

11010111101010110010010011010111 → This is a Bitcoin

But not every random list of binary digits is a valid Bitcoin. For example, this is not a Bitcoin:

11001111010001000101100100100101 → This is not a Bitcoin

This is an invalid Bitcoin because the majority of the blockchain network thought it’s invalid. When asked to vote, more than 51% voted “No, not a valid Bitcoin.”

The next question is: Is there an infinite amount of valid Bitcoins? The answer is “No”. Those who designed the system (Satoshi Nakamoto, are you reading this?) put a limit on all the possible valid Bitcoins. This is done programmatically, which means it can’t be bypassed:

// All the possible Bitcoins, ever
11010111101010110010010011010111
11001111010001000101100100100101
11100101001000010101000110100100…